Alameda schools leaders offer assurances in wake of sex assault

School district officials and police sought to calm jittery parents Tuesday in the wake of a reported sexual assault of a student Friday on the Ruby Bridges Elementary School campus.

Superintendent Kirsten Vital told Ruby Bridges parents who attended their school’s Parent Teacher Association meeting Tuesday evening – a meeting that was supposed to focus on the PTA’s back to school needs – that the district had hammered out a deal with the city’s parks department to fence off the blacktop that sits behind the school, which the school and the park department share.

The school will also begin closing and locking the gates that surround it; in practice, parents and others said the gates are routinely left open. Taken all together, the moves will close the campus to outsiders.

Police, meanwhile, noted that they responded within minutes of receiving a call from an after-school program staffer about the possible sexual assault of a student in the program, who had been told about the incident by another student. Police caught the 14-year-old suspects six minutes after they arrived, they said, and are continuing to investigate the case.